Please register your interest in CrimeTalk so that you get future Newsletters, offers and freebies, and are automatically updated with developments. You can do this either via the CrimSoc page, the Comment/Forum page, or the LogIn and Register box on the Home page. The CrimSoc page is best, because there you can develop your profile, upload a photo or avatar, to give your postings some personality. We ask for a minimum amount of information and that data will not be shared with any other person or organization, other than my web developer, Tahir Rasul. When you register, you should receive an automatic welcome letter written by myself, and I will be notified automatically of your registration.

2 The Forums or BBs

The Forums amount to a number of bulletin boards or talk spaces where you can discuss stuff. Within a particular forum, just hit the New Topic button below the last message if you want to make a new post or the Reply button to reply to an existing one. If you want to launch a new forum yourself, then go to the top menu and click on New Topic and make the first post on it. Remember, give your post a title and also that you can use the mood buttons if you want to give some tone to the topic or post. I think all the other buttons are self-explanatory.

3 CrimSoc

CrimSoc is a full-fledged social network space, like Facebook, enabling you to connect privately with friends or colleagues all over the world, within CrimeTalk. You can message each other privately and securely within CrimSoc, or post podcasts and other video messages. You can also create groups and message selected groups of fellow users. It could be the virtual home for your research group, your seminar group, your lecture class or just your friends.

When you go into CrimSoc, having registered and noting to click on the Remember Me button on entry, you'll see that all the Recent Activities onsite, that is, the titles of latest articles and comments and any of my updates, are listed on your home page. There are several other buttons to click. Go ahead and see what they offer. You can even install various applications into your own page.

4 Comments and User Ratings

You will notice that all articles have comments bubbles next to them, showing the number of comments made on the article, and also 'User Ratings' with 5 choices from poor to Best. Yes, you can comment on and rate articles. DO feel free to use both rating and commenting on CrimeTalk. But please register and log in first so that your identity shows by your comment. You don't have to, but it would be nice to know who is making the comment and we really want to discourage anonymous abuse. It is my way of encouraging taking responsibility for comments and joining into the community we are trying to form here.

Each article has a Leave a Reply box after it. Click on it to comment. You will also see various buttons which enable you to edit your comment. Comments themselves have Reply buttons to enable comments on comments. With user ratings, just make sure you click the rating number you want before you click the 'Rate' button.

Comments and ratings added to an article give it life. They give the publication a dynamic, interactive and contemporary quality. Ratings are an anonymous and quick way of commenting without getting into a discussion of your opinion! After the Leave a Reply box, you'll see that there is a little box to click which enables you to be notified of follow-up comments. If you're registered, this is a useful facility in a debate.

5 The Shop

Shopping for books to support CrimeTalk would be something you can do at no extra cost to yourself if you were going to buy the book anyway. Our bookshop is associated with Amazon and you in effect buy the book from Amazon with CrimeTalk getting a small commission. This is one way of recovering our costs on this project. Please support us this way and if you are a teacher please encourage your students to buy their criminology or law books through us. As you will already know, Amazon is very reliable and often sells new or second-hand books below their ordinary bookshop prices.

The Editor has hand-picked a large number of books already and these are displayed in the main panel. To change categories, just click on one of our other related categories in the box on the right. To buy a book just click on it.

Please note that you can buy any Amazon book, or indeed any Amazon product whatsoever, through the CrimeTalk bookshop: just use the Search box at the bottom, click on the product you want and that will take you into the Amazon website.

Note also that we have a DVD and MP3 shop, under a separate menu sub-item, where you can buy DVDs of top tv crime dramas, such as The Wire and crime-related tunes. Please again consider this as a way of supporting CrimeTalk.

6 Tweets

I now make several tweets daily for your interest; in fact usually they are selective re-tweets of other people's messages from all over the place. Our own Correspondents also send useful and interesting tweets to me and I re-tweet those too. CrimeTalk 'follows' the messages of some 870 twitterers, including politicians, government departments, newspaper editors, journalists, criminologists, forensic scientists, psychologists, sociologists, lawyers and rights groups, students, prisoners, reform movements, support groups, victims' groups, offenders' organizations, censured groups, rebels and various kinds of commentators all over the world, They show in the Latest Tweets module on the Home page and the last 100 are archived on the Tweets page in the Library. They usually contain links to valuable online resources and stories.

I'm very happy for registered users to use CrimeTalk's Twitter account to send out tweets - you would do this if you wanted immediate global publicity for a piece of information, or to publicize your latest research or publication, or to make a comment in an important public debate. To send out a tweet through CrimeTalk,you could either e-mail your message to me in the normal way, OR message me privately from within Twitter, OR message me from within our CrimSoc pages and I will re-tweet the message to the world from our Twitter page. The latter is called CrimeTalkEd, so within Twitter you message me @CrimeTalkEd.

7 CrimeTalk's Facebook page

We now have a CrimeTalk page on Facebook. All the titles and links to our latest articles and comments are published there. That page can be accessed from the CrimeTalk Home page via the blue Facebook button above LogIn on the right-hand side. If you have your own Facebook page you can link CrimeTalk's FB page into that and so always be kept up to date with what we're publishing.

8 Social sharing buttons

Every article now has social sharing buttons at the bottom. The 'Share' button enables you to tell your friends about that article - it places a link to it on your FB Wall. The 'Like' button puts a link onto your FB profile page. The 'Tweet' button enables you to tweet a message about the article via Twitter to particular people or everyone.

9 The RSS button

Really Simple Syndication can be initiated by the orange button at the top of the Home page, above LogIn and left of the Facebook and Twitter buttons on the Home page. Just click on this and you will see the titles and opening paragraphs of our most recent articles. These are linked so you could click on the links to take you to the articles themselves. On the right of this summary page or digest is a column of menu items which are fairly self-explanatory. If you want an automatic update from us by e-mail when we publish a new article, click on Subscribe in Mail. You should find that it will automatically mail you with the last 10 article titles, with links, and put a CrimeTalk RSS button in your e-mail software.

The same RSS button can be found at the bottom of every page of CrimeTalk. If you're very busy, it is an efficient way of keeping up with CrimeTalk and getting notified of the latest articles.